All Aboard, for a Trip to the Past

Pullman Rail Journeys Scenes Clockwise from top left: Porter and waiter Larry Hughes takes a moment on a trip from Chicago to New Orleans; looking out at the landscape; cocktails are served; the conductor Mike Griesmann heads back on board.

Alex Wroblewski for The New York Times

By FREDA MOON

May 16, 2014

It was the tail end of winter, and the trees outside the train car window were spindly twigs. Behind the bare branches, the sky was alight. To my half-asleep, hardly focusing, hung-over eyes, it was a blurry layer cake of blueberry, raspberry and tangerine. I had boarded the train in Chicago at dusk on Friday, three days before, and had rolled down 926 miles of rail. I’d spent 20 frivolous, indulgent hours in New Orleans, where I’d had fried oysters and fried green tomatoes at Upperline, midnight cocktails at the bar Cure and a hedonistic jazz brunch at Commander’s Palace. Then, before I could acclimate to the warmth and the green, the music and the food, I was on the next northbound train.

The whole time, Willie Nelson’s take on “City of New Orleans,” an anthem to the Illinois Central, the so-called Main Line of mid-America, was in the back of my mind; its Steve Goodman lyrics were on the tip of my tongue. Now it was 6:30 Monday morning, and I was tucked into a twin berth of a vintage Pullman sleeper — one of two restored antique cars being pulled by Amtrak’s comparably modern train — and we were about to pull into Champaign, Ill. It had been a dizzying, exhausting weekend, and I should have gone back to sleep. But the horizon had me. Whatever it was up to, I didn’t want to miss. For the past 65 hours, I’d been picturing this scene, with its houses, farms and fields, its Midwestern dawn. And here was that song again. “Good morning, America, how are you?”

Pullman Rail Journeys was started in 2012 by Iowa Pacific Holdings, a company that owns or partners with several iconic passenger train lines in places like Macchu Pichu, the Rio Grande Valley in Colorado and Mount Hood in Oregon. Iowa Pacific’s president, Ed Ellis, who grew up riding trains, seems nostalgic for the golden age of rail travel. He’s also bullish about its potential for a comeback. It’s an ambitious effort; each antique car restoration costs $750,000 to $1.2 million. They’re beautiful old things.

A view from a Pullman train about an hour from New Orleans.

Freda Moon

“The idea of being in a room with people, where you can have a conversation and listen to music, it’s a completely different kind of travel than sitting three abreast in airline seats,” Mr. Ellis said. “There are people who have been there and done that. They’re looking for heritage experiences. They want to understand what it was like for their parents and grandparents.”

Still, it’s hard to escape the sense that Mr. Ellis’s time-traveling adventure is a big gamble, one that may amount to a dazzling but short-lived experiment. (Although Pullman’s capacity is 40 to 90 passengers, depending on how many cars are attached, there were only 11 paying passengers on my ride to New Orleans, and just six on the return trip. According to Mr. Ellis, that’s not uncommon.)

Pullman Rail Journeys is an experiment that will expand this fall, when it begins running between Chicago and New York City. The new trips will travel either Amtrak’s Northern route, the Lake Shore Limited, or the Cardinal route, which dips south through the Blue Ridge Mountains, the Shenandoah Valley and the New River Gorge, stopping in Indianapolis, Cincinnati, the Greenbrier resort in West Virginia and Washington, D.C.

From the outside, the mysterious, frosted door to the first-class passenger waiting area, the Metropolitan Lounge, at Chicago Union Station suggested it was Amtrak’s answer to those gleaming airport V.I.P. lounges. I had visions of cocktail servers, skewered-shrimp appetizers and hot showers for freshening up before the journey. Instead, I found well-worn furniture with chipping lacquer and exhausted upholstery. TVs played CNN on an endless loop of Malaysian Air crash coverage. The basket of complimentary snacks was down to one lone bag of dry pretzels, and the coffee pot was not just empty but missing in action.

I’d paid $1,089 for round-trip tickets from Chicago to New Orleans (travelpullman.com), and two-thirds of my time would be spent in-transit — a total of more than 40 hours on the train. This trip was the journey. As I watched gray-haired women in camel-colored wool and floor-length fur nodding off around me, I worried that I’d been misled by Goodman’s wistful eulogy to the “magic carpet made of steel” and that the Pullman ride might amount to an overpriced, overlong slog through cornfields and Southern swampland.

Before I could find out, I had nearly a full day to kill in Chicago. I checked my bags, and took another train, the Metra commuter rail, to the Pullman State Historic Site (pullman-museum.org) on the city’s Far South Side. Long before there was Pullman Rail Journeys, there was the Pullman Palace Car Company, the company that transformed the way Americans traveled in the 19th and early 20th centuries. I got off the Metra at 115th Street and was met by Mike Wagenbach, the site superintendent. We had exchanged emails, and he’d offered to show me around Pullman Town, which is being considered for National Park status.

Dinner is served.

Alex Wroblewski for The New York Times

The factory community was founded by George Pullman, an engineer who built his wealth raising Chicago’s buildings from their marshy lakeside depths. Rail travel was still new then. “It was like riding in a cattle car,” Mr. Wagenbach said. “People living in mansions were sleeping on straw.” But Pullman, proudly nouveau riche, saw the potential for luxury along the rail lines. Both a train car manufacturer and a passenger service operator, his company effectively created the first-class market. It would also become the largest employer of African-Americans, nearly all of them former slaves, whom Pullman hired as porters, making it a major force in hastening the migration of blacks from the South and a complicated, fascinating player in post-Emancipation America. (On the one hand, porters were so dehumanized that many passengers simply referred to them all as George, the name of their employer. On the other, the wages from the Pullman Company and passenger tips helped cement the black middle class.)

Once a self-contained company town, Pullman is still a living neighborhood. As we walked, Mr. Wagenbach explained that the community was designed as a workers’ utopia, removed from the vice and immorality of the budding metropolis to the north. It had an opulent, modern hotel for visiting executives, a nondenominational church of green Pennsylvania serpentine and a park with a formal garden. There were grand executive homes overlooking the factory, tight brick rowhouses around the park and tenement-style apartments at the edge of town. Today, the Pullman factory administration building, which was partly destroyed by arson in 1998, smells like cookies and construction; there’s a Keebler plant nearby and tins of paint thinner in the corner. But after a five-year reconstruction, the 10-story clock tower facade, Pullman’s “signature structure,” according to Mr. Wagenbach, once again looks out on the passing trains of the Illinois Central.

After a long day of fighting the remnants of the Chicago winter, I was finally introduced to sleeper car Baton Rouge, room G.

The Wren and the Whistler play on board.

Freda Moon

In the Metropolitan Lounge, the Pullman conductor Mike Griesmann and porter Gary Lightfoot had introduced themselves to the small group of passengers who would be riding the Pullman service to New Orleans. Like kindergartners on a field trip, we followed them to our respective rooms, where our bags were waiting for us. The car was an immaculately restored antique, its exterior painted a Smokey Bear brown with an orange stripe down the side. Inside, my roomette was pink and blue in the shades of a plastic 1950s dollhouse. It had its own tiny showerless bathroom (shared showers were down the aisle) and a fold-down bed.

Though they were towed by an Amtrak train, our two Pullman cars were self-contained, inaccessible to the rest of the train and inescapable by us. At times, it felt as if we existed in a parallel universe — and not always comfortably. (At one stop on my return trip, a handful of Amtrak riders walked the gravel path along the tracks to peer into our privileged time capsule. We were eating a three-course lunch, complete with midday libations and a nearly one-to-one crew-to-passenger ratio. It was all a bit embarrassing. I’d checked the cost of an Amtrak sleeper ticket on the same train, and knew they were actually nominally more expensive than my sale-priced Pullman ticket, which was nearly half-off on the New Orleans-to-Chicago leg of the trip.)

Even before the New Orleans-bound train pulled away from the station, nearly all of our group gathered in the lounge car, with its rounded rump and windows on all sides. We settled in with wine or Scotch, making the first awkward small talk of a tour group. There was a 20-something couple who eloped to New Orleans last year and were returning for their one-year anniversary and another young couple, friendly suburbanites who had dressed for the occasion (she in a skirt, despite the March chill, and he in a business suit). Then there was George Beavers, a train buff from Mississippi, who joined a buddy on a business trip and insisted they take the train; a retired couple from Virginia who seemed to have gone on many of the great North American train trips; and another older couple, who kept largely to themselves as the rest of us lingered in the lounge car late into the night.

There were also two musicians, Jason McInnes and Judy Higgins, a.k.a. the Wren and the Whistler. Brought on board as part of a twice-monthly collaboration between Pullman and Chicago’s great Old Town School of Folk Music, they were both passengers and performers.

For the rest of the evening, and all the next day, the lounge car was the place to be. Stocked with endless free drinks, live music and the excitement that comes with being en route to New Orleans, it felt like a party — a party with impossibly attentive service. In addition to the conductor and the porter, there were a steward, Jeremy Kniola; a waiter, Jack Senese; and the chef, Mark Guzman, who had earned his train-kitchen chops while working for the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey circus and whose sister, Sonia Respeto, is the executive chef for the Chicago White Sox. Almost as soon as the train left Union Station, Mr. Kniola rang a bell and announced dinner.

We found seats at a long table set with a white tablecloth, yellow carnations and more forks and knives than most of us seemed to know what to do with. There was a relish tray of olives, celery and pickled watermelon rinds, the “signature dish of the Illinois Central,” according to Mr. Beavers, who had a knowledge of Pullman history to rival Mr. Wagenbach’s. He would, for example, explain that the dining car’s rear was not original, but an adaptation circa the 1950s (it was actually 1947) and the fact that Amtrak charges Pullman several thousand dollars per car (an average of $6,000) for the lift, which Pullman later confirmed.

Dinner was a stylized menu of retro dishes: salmon slathered in vermouth caper butter; herb-roasted chicken with sherry-mushroom cream sauce; and a roast beef tenderloin with Madeira demi-glace so good I ordered it two days in a row. Afterward, there were more drinks and looser talk. We migrated back to the end of the car as Jason and Judy prepared to play. “It’s social music,” Jason said, clearly reluctant to interrupt the conversation. “Don’t feel like you have to stop talking.” But as soon as he and Judy got going, with their fiddle and banjo, harmonica and guitar, they had our attention. Crammed into the tight space of a narrow train car, Judy had to watch her bow. “It’s like playing on a submarine,” said Mr. Griesmann, the conductor, dropping in as he did now and then.

For me, the music made the trip. As Steve Goodman wrote, it was there even without the arsenal of instruments. Rail travel is rhythmic. It has its own beat, its own sway, its own jerking, erratic thrust. Even its dullest hours are sexier than the lustiest mile-high moments of contemporary air travel. The old-timey music was an anchor, a reason to linger a bit longer in the lounge car. It was an excuse to indulge in that chocolate-mousse third course, to flag the steward for another of those Belgian-style ales, to really sop up the sentimental cocktail of passing scenery.

As we rode through the darkness, Jason and Judy passed around musical spoons, kazoos and shakers. They played and sang, and we joined in. We belted out Bob Dylan’s classic bootleg “Rock Me Mama,” which references train travel only euphemistically (“Rock me mama like the wind and the rain / Rock me mama like a southbound train”). At a fellow passenger’s pleading request, there was Leadbelly’s “Goodnight Irene.” I even got a quiet, moving rendition of “City of New Orleans” and its disappearing railroad blues.

Looking around the country at stalled rail project after stalled rail project, I don’t quite buy the idea that there will be another big shift in American tastes in transit, that rail travel will ever really make a comeback in this country. But my whirlwind round trip made me very much want to be wrong.

Correction: June 1, 2014

A map on May 18 with the cover article about a trip between Chicago and New Orleans on a restored Pullman train misspelled the name of a Tennessee town along the rail line. It is Dyersburg, not Dyersberg.